More risks than benefits in CSG

What do you call an industry that doesn’t create many job opportunities, doesn’t provide significant revenue for the economy and destroys structural homeland industries through systemic and endemic collateral damage?

It’s called the coal seam gas industry.

Earlier this year I put forward the Environment Protection Bill, which called for an immediate halt to all drilling for a two-year period.

This is clearly a radical proposal but worries about our standing and reputation with the outside world pale into insignificance beside placing one of our great water resources – the Great Artesian Basin – at risk. Turning this natural resource into a pin cushion is bad enough but when it could turn out to be a poisonous pin cushion? Whoa, boy!

And let me be specific. Coal seam gas when mixed with water will contaminate it; poison may not be too strong a word.

To put things into context, I am well aware of what a toxic danger is. As a long-time miner and prospector (in my younger days), as well as a mine owner-operator, I knew that our target, copper sulphate, was poisonous – as is radiation from the sun for that matter.

One-quarter of my home town of Charters Towers was cyanide mounds. But no one has ever died of cyanide poisoning in Charters Towers.

Coal seam gas is different and is a real danger.

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Considered scientific knowledge shows that in the case of coal seam gas, 60,000 wells are probably required to make any real profit from the liquefaction plants. And these 60,000 wells compressed into Queensland and Australia’s best farmland? Whoa, boy!

To claim that there will be no contamination of the Great Artesian Basin and other lesser aquifers is not only irresponsible but clearly untruthful. And herein lies the imperative – the necessity for objective scientific analysis.

Imagine one-tenth of Queensland and NSW crisscrossed by thousands of kilometres of pipes half a metre high.

Then imagine mustering thousands of cattle through this maze of gas lines, or, worse still, farming such a paddock.

Another issue is depletion of the resource. One coal seam gas mining company in its environmental impact statement claims its mining would deplete the Great Artesian Basin by under 150 megalitres a year; it was and is depleting the Great Artesian Basin by nearly 5000 megalitres a year. I emphasise that this is just one mine.

Why are the Queensland, NSW and to date the federal governments so intractable in their determination to progress this industry?

They tell us many jobs and vast revenue will accrue to Queensland and Australia. We are told a projected $60,000 million a year in revenue. And this is correct.

But what we are not told is there will also be $60,000 million a year in outgoings overseas.

The vital point to grasp is that more than 80 per cent of the industry is foreign-owned and a further 10 per cent is on the foreign auction block.

The report commissioned by the Bligh Queensland government, Queensland LNG Industry 2010, claims $850 million a year in royalties on 28 megatonnes of production.

It further claims, and in my opinion rightly so, that “the industry could grow to twice this size", meaning $1700 million a year in royalties. It also stated that “some 4000 jobs may be created", bringing an additional $400 million a year into the economy.

So, $2000 million in jobs and royalties but jeopardising, disrupting and shutting down significant proportions of the Queensland and NSW grain industries, and more particularly, sheep and cattle. The latter two industries are worth $15,000 million a year to the economy.

There is no surface water in eastern Australia’s great inland plains. All of the cattle and sheep industries and all of the fauna exist only because of the bores drilled into God’s Great Gift to Australia: the Great Artesian Basin.